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Thursday, August 25, 2016

Thank you for making our summer series: The Films of Christopher Nolan, such a success!

Summer is sadly coming to its close and fall is slowly creeping in, so naturally I'm very excited to be planning our annual Horror Fest for October! But, I'm getting ahead of myself here. For the month of September I've decided to show one of my favorite films of 2010 (the film that should've won best picture, in my opinion). David Fincher's masterful The Social Network.

The Social Network is a 2010 American biographical drama film directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin. Adapted from Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal, the film portrays the founding of the social networking website Facebook and the resulting lawsuits. It stars Jesse Eisenberg as founder Mark Zuckerberg, along with Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin and Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker. The film was released in the US by Columbia Pictures on Oct. 1, 2010.

The Social Network received widespread acclaim, with critics praising its direction, screenplay, acting, editing and score. Although several people portrayed in the film criticized its historical inaccuracies, the film appeared on 78 critics’ Top 10 lists for 2010; of those critics, 22 had the film in the their number-one spot, the most of any film in its year. At the 83rd Academy Awards, the film received eight nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director for Fincher, and Best Actor for Eisenberg, and won three for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Film Editing. The film holds a 96% Fresh rating on Rottentomatoes.com out of 290 critical reviews. Roger Ebert placed it as his top film of 2010 and awarded the film 4/4 stars saying this in his review: “David Fincher’s film has the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way. It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive. It hurtles through two hours of spellbinding dialogue. It makes an untellable story clear and fascinating. The Social Network is a great film not because of its dazzling style or visual cleverness, but because it is splendidly well-made. Despite the baffling complications of computer programming, web strategy and big finance, Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay makes it all clear, and we don’t follow the story so much as get dragged along behind it. I saw it with an audience that seemed wrapped up in an unusual way: It was very, very interested.”

This is one of my favorite films released in the past decade so, naturally, I would love to share the viewing experience with all of you. We will be meeting Thursday, Sept. 15th at 6:15pm. Hope you can make it out!

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Our two films for the month of August are Inception and Interstellar.Inception will be showing Thursday, Aug. 11th at 6:00pm (please note the earlier start time to accommodate the longer running time)

Inception is a
2010 science fiction heist thriller film written, produced, and directed by
Christopher Nolan. The film stars a
large ensemble cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, Joseph
Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Ken Watanabe, Tom Hardy, Dileep Rao, Cillian
Murphy, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine.
DiCaprio plays a professional thief who commits corporate espionage by
infiltrating the subconscious of his targets.
He is offered a chance to have his criminal history erased as payment
for a task considered to be impossible: “inception”, the implantation of
another person’s idea into a target’s subconscious.

The films currently holds an 86%
fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 325 critical reviews. Roger Ebert awarded the film 4/4 stars saying
this of the film in his review, “The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told
at all. Here is a movie immune to
spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew
how it got there. And telling you how it
got there would produce bafflement. The
movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of
reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It’s a breathtaking juggling act. The movies often seem to come from the
recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises. Inception
does a difficult thing. It is wholly
original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it
feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. I thought there was a hole in Memento: How does a man with short-term
memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there’s a hole in Inception too, but I can’t find it.
Christopher Nolan reinvented Batman.
This time he isn’t reinventing anything.
Yet few directors will attempt to recycle Inception. I think when
Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map.”

Interstellar will be showing Thursday, Aug. 18th at 5:30pm (please note the earlier start time to accommodate the longer running time)

Interstellar
is a 2014 epic science fiction film directed by Christopher Nolan and starring
Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine. The film features a crew of astronauts who
travel through a wormhole in search of a new home for humanity. Brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan wrote
the screenplay. Caltech theoretical
physicist Kip Thorne, whose work inspired the film, was an executive producer
and acted as scientific consultant.

The film holds a 71% rating on Rotten
Tomatoes based on 294 critical reviews.
Matt Zoller Seitz writing for Rogerebert.com gave the film 3 ½ /4 stars
saying this in his review, “There’s something pure and powerful about this
movie. I can’t recall a science fiction
film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many
major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down
their cheeks. The movie’s science
fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional drama about
basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and
culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts-one that treats the star
voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors
for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness,
or unbridgeable distance. Here, more so
than any other Nolan film (and that’s saying a lot), time is everything. “I’m an old physicist” Brand tells Cooper
early in the film “I’m afraid of time.”
Time is something we all fear.
There’s a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global
to the familial. Every act by every
character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.”